Problem with Aweber's new html broadcast editor

Various issues.

I've been with Aweber for a very long time and was using the legacy editor because it worked well and I didn't want to learn a new interface just because some bright spark thought I should.

On the new one:

• Menu options disappear so the site navigation vanishes
• Most of the options aren't obvious and are spread over various screens - it's easy enough nowadays to program this so that it could be all the same underlying code and have a regular and an advanced option where advanced is all on one screen (putting my techie hat on and viewing source, I'm pretty certain the underlying code is all on one page anyway or is close to that)
• Copy and paste between HTML and plain text is glitchy, adding extra line breaks. That kind of schoolboy coding error goes back to last century.
• Copying a broadcast doesn't copy the lists it was sent to (Tom Kulzer says this will be fixed today)
• Unscheduling a broadcast and then rescheduling it forgets all the lists so you have to select them all again
• Lists are selected inside a scrolling window so instead of seeing all lists you just see roughly 8 at a time. Which means it's super-easy to get the wrong ones - I accidentally included my JV partners in an email yesterday so had to send them an apology (that got several replies along the lines of "I know what you're going through, it's broken")
• For me, the default time zone selection is Australia - it used to be EST and apparently should now default to my local time zone which is UK time. Support say they are looking at this but have been unable to recreate it (hmm, bug testers live all over the world for precisely that reason - I know someone locally who outsources some of their bug testing for precisely that reason)

It would be very simple to roll back the "upgrade" until everything has been properly tested but that doesn't seem to be on the radar as an option.

It's exceptionally time consuming to move from an autoresponder company - my lists tie in with Warrior Plus, I've got opt-in forms all over the place, that kind of thing - so my preference is that they get this fixed.

Fingers crossed...

Looks like a lot of Aweber customers are seriously ticked off at the new Drafts Folder and the removal of the old email editor.

See the comments on this post:

https://blog.aweber.com/new-features...il-content.htm

Turns out we are not the only ones who's had issues with the new Drafts Folder. They have 40 comments in this blog and the first 20 or so that I've read so far are not happy with the changes.

Really this is the worst "upgrade" they have made in 9 years.

Tom Kulzer and Aweber are well aware of this problem. They're probably not trying to revert back to the previous ways of doing things because of the expense of what they just programmed.

But in so many ways this new system truly sucks.

Roger

Roger,

I appreciate you taking the time to passionately share your feedback. Everyone's feedback is important and it helps improve AWeber. I'll try to give a bit more insight into why certain decisions were made and to provide a bit more context that seems to be missing from this thread.

Some context:

19 of 47 comments on that blog post are AWeber team members, several more are multiple comments from the one or more people, with give or take about 25 total unique people commenting.

There are 110,000+ users of AWeber. Tens of thousands login daily.

You are clearly personally affected by the Drafts function release and I'm sorry for that. The majority of the 25 users commenting on the blog post were also using the "previous message editor" which you describe and that which any AWeber user that has signed up in the last 2 years has never seen nor had access to.


Several things that you comment below as being bugs are conscious functional decisions that I'll explain further.


Everyone here has access to all customer reported bugs along with the number of reports we've received about each bug. The most widely reported issue right now as it stands from our leaderboard is the copy include/exclude lists from previous broadcasts. It has been reported by 30 users across phone, email, and live chat.

Per our updated blog post and communication that we've emailed to those 30 users our team has already committed to getting the copy lists function live today.


I believe you outlined 5, if you have more, please contact our team. If you haven't already contacted our team with specifics regards to your account I'd encourage you to do so.


It's hard to tell from this single sentence whether that's something that's by design or something that might be a bug.

I'm guessing (please correct if I'm wrong) you are pasting in HTML paragraphs that might have had some line wrapping on them? You paragraphs should still have breaks between them. However, line wrapping HTML or other plain text content itself within a paragraph to make the line say 50 characters long is not a best practice these days. It breaks mobile email and is definitely not responsive from the huge variety of screen sizes people read email on these days. It used to be a best practice to make lines in email less than 70 characters or so, that's no longer true today as email clients will wrap it to the best width themselves.


See above. #1 and #2 seem like the same thing.

See item #1. Line wrapping paragraphs manually in email is no longer best practice and is purposely not there anymore. What email client are you reading email on that's making those paragraphs extremely long? That line wrap tool is not in the current editor that tens of thousands of users have used over the past 2+ years.


This is a bug and is being corrected. It's intermittent for some people, we're still determining the specific cause.

We've not had that reported from any other users before. Please contact our team or myself tomk @ aweber with more details about which specific message that was and when you might have created/sent it so we can look at our logs to troubleshoot.


If he hasn't already, please encourage him to contact us so we can troubleshoot the issue he's seeing.


You were needing to manually line wrap messages before by clicking a button. Now, email clients do the line wrapping for you automatically. The step you were doing before is no longer necessary.


We release changes multiple times per week, sometimes multiple times per day. The benefit of using cloud based software is that you do always have the latest version. Sometimes, yes those workflows might change, but in the long run it's my belief that always having the latest version saves time and makes your business better. You wouldn't still want to be running the AWeber version from back in 1998 when I started the company and I sure wouldn't want to still have to support the literally thousands of different versions and iterations we've made since then.

I'm just guessing, but you've likely upgraded your computer, phone, word processor, spreadsheet, shopping cart, operating system, and a myriad of other tools in the past 10 years. If we kept everything for 10 years without making improvements or adopting the latests best practices our users would leave in droves for competitors who were iterating and making improvements.

No company has ever released software that was perfect. All software has bugs. I recognize that there are 2 bugs above which are affecting you and I can assure you I and the rest of the team take those reports seriously and are looking into their cause and resolution.

It just took me four minutes to remove all of the spaces from the plain text email.

Sometimes I send multiple emails in a day.

Then I'm going to have to manually select about 28 email lists to send to. That will be another 4 or 5 minutes absolutely wasted.

Hope they fix this soon.

Roger